Playing with dolls is a favorite preoccupation with children, especially girls, it is very instrumental in working the child's imagination, as opposed to watching television or other passive activities which require no positive action on the part of the child. Doll play no doubt goes back for millennia. In recent years, toy companies have seized upon the popularity of dolls with little girls to produce an unending sequence of new dolls with advanced features, such as wetting their diapers, drinking milk from a bottle, crying, and otherwise acting like a baby. These dolls tend to be quite high-priced, and whereas they may or may not detract from the imagination required to work with them because of their built-in features, they probably do not add anything.
One problem with dolls is that the principle activity that children engage them in is dressing and undressing. For example, the BARBIE doll (tm) has dozens of different outfits for playing tennis, for getting married, for going to a formal, etc. The problem with this type of doll play is that because the doll outfits necessarily come in a number of separate pieces, like all separate-piece toys, the pieces become lost. Once one piece of an outfit is lost, generally the whole outfit is useless, as it looks cute when integrated as a whole. Losing parts of an outfit is particularly problematic when traveling in a car. When playing with a doll in a car, it is very easy to misplace one or more of the outfit components in the traveling litter that almost always accompanies automobile travel with children.
There's a need for a simple, back-to-basics doll set which would provide built-in outfit component storage to minimize the losses of the component parts of the outfits, and which would be compact enough to use conveniently in the back seat of a moving vehicle.